Monthly Archives: November 2023

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Grace Notes 18: “I Want to Do So Many Things”

If Grace’s life in these years was full of remarkable developments — buying a house, completing her masters, changing jobs — she was soon to add another. On May 28, 1971, she married again. William D. “Dub” White was a longtime friend and faculty colleague at St. Andrews. Grace wore the blue chiffon gown I’d worn to my brother’s wedding. Dub wore a tux his sister had given him, first owned by her late husband, Jim Reeves — the velvet-voiced Gentleman Jim.

In July, fresh off their honeymoon in Puerto Rico, Grace flew to Iowa City for the much-anticipated seminar on Richard Wright, whose work so compelled her and whose life she was researching.

Then, in August, another development: Grace was diagnosed with breast cancer. She had a radical mastectomy.

Woven through the coming months would be the medical challenges and the work she was determined to do despite them. Grace would write to us that she was feeling better; then something would appear in her hip. She’d say she’d been walking with a stylish cane but no longer needed it. Then a lesion would show up in her shoulder.

In September, she wrote a friend: “I am teaching two classes but doing very little counseling until I feel stronger. Each day, almost, I see an improvement, but it seems slow when I want to do so many things and all I feel like doing is lying down after my classes.”

Later that month, a letter from the academic press at the University of Missouri about her proposed article on Richard Wright brought stirring news: “What you describe — the entire route of it — sounds most exciting. In fact, your ‘Retracing Wright’s Footsteps in Memphis’ is perhaps our most exciting possibility to date (and most original). And I think that you are surely gallant, in view of your illness, to push on with the project.”

In letter after letter that fall, Grace did indeed push on, searching out people who had known Wright in Memphis, pinning down addresses where he’d lived, determining where he had worked. Then, in an October 1971 letter to the National Council of Teachers of English, she asked with great regret to be relieved of her responsibility as a discussion leader on curricular innovation at their upcoming convention in Las Vegas. She was due back at Duke for treatment.

In January of 1972 for “winter term” she and Dub went to Nashville, staying with my brother and sister-in-law. Grace was doing research at Fisk University for a possible textbook on African-American writers. I came from my cub-reporting job in Colorado Springs to join them, bearing clippings. She wrote to a friend, “You would be really proud of G’s newspaper work — by the quality of her writing, by her beat (City Hall) and by her special features.”

In a March 1972 letter to me, Grace writes that she is very much looking forward to seeing my sister and her family during spring break. Afterward, Dub and she will take the train to New York. “Classes resume April 4. That week on Friday I return to Duke and again the following Wed-Fri. By that time maybe changes of some kind will be observable.”

A letter to a colleague reports that “I have not walked on crutches since I returned to teach the spring term. But my shoulder developed a small lesion and I had to go back every day for a week to take cobalt in that area. I return to Duke this week. The shoulder trouble has evidently not cleared up but seems to have spread under the arm and in certain spots across my back. Now the possibility of cancer appearing looms larger in my mind than it once did. I will be relieved to find out something definitive this week.”

Later in the spring, she wrote to a friend: “I am getting along very well although I take 5 lethal anti-cancer drugs daily and/or weekly. You would be interested to know that these are drugs developed during World War II for use in chemical warfare. Isn’t there an ironic poetic justice in this? Of course they are a shot in the dark and whether they will contain my cancer is knowable only through time.”

She adds that they plan to leave St. Andrews right after commencement for Nashville, where she has a grant to pursue more research at Fisk for her proposed textbook. They expect to be in England in July for a meeting Dub is to be part of.

Next in the letters file appears one of those periodic reflections Grace wrote to herself over the years — a rather curious one. It must have been written shortly after her marriage to Dub, though it’s not dated: “As I look at myself today, I find I can gain perspective by looking at the four men who have influenced what I now am. My father, a large, warm, much-liked, outspoken native Texan gave me a sense of pride in who I am and a challenge as to what I might become… My former husband, father of my three children, was brought up in a home conditioned to ‘the woman’s place is…’. My son: Our relationship is a very good one — warm, honest reaching-out, open. For many years it was tense. I am thankful he had the strength to stand up for who he was and that I was able finally to see that I was hurting our relationship because of my own lack of clarity about his needs and my expectations… My present husband, who accepts my abilities, and we share all aspects of achievements.

“As I think of my future life, I do so now in a freer way — free from the restrictions imposed by society or from my own interpretation of them. I understand now that my own self-concepts were both positively and negatively affected by men, and that I have both lost and gained myself.”

In her last letter to me, Grace proudly enclosed what she called “THE article” — her deeply researched piece on Richard Wright’s Memphis years. “If you can find time, take 15 minutes to snap out a critical response. I’m interested in your evaluation because I respect your knowledge and skill, and also because I think this is written as a journalist rather than as a literary scholar.”

“My thoughts go out to you often, hoping you are finding your way through the things we talked about. I am happy that you have such a productive job; that is one of the most important things in life, I know.“

By early summer, changes had indeed become observable, and not for the better. After a long hospital stay, Grace asked the good doctors at Duke to send her home — along with a great deal of pain medication.

She died on Sunday evening, July 16, 1972. We were all at her bedside.

Her funeral, at Laurinburg Presbyterian Church, brought the little North Carolina town together — high school and college, black and white, young and old. “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” followed upon “A Mighty Fortress is our God.” The minister ended his remarks by saying, “When grief is done, and we are freer than we are today, have a party, and invite people you might not usually think to invite. Make them welcome, and give them a chance to experience the grace inherent in such an act and the love which transcends lifestyle, appearance, age, politics, race, education and station in life. That will honor, and that would have pleased, Grace.”

She was 58 years old. She’d had just six years of that new life she’d struggled to reach — along with the rich, complicated years before.

On the eve of her marriage to Jim, Grace had written a long list of goals she had set for herself, concluding: “These are the things I want in my life. If I carry out my aims, I should be a Grace McSpadden I can be proud of.”

Damned if she hadn’t done it.

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Grace Notes 17: Possibilities Abound

Grace with her Laurinburg High School Advanced English students

After Grace and Jim separated and I left for college, she continued to teach her Advanced English classes at the local high school and to work on her masters during the summer. But new paths were opening quickly. In the next few years, Grace would change jobs, buy a house and avidly pursue her interest in Black literature. If this new life had its challenges, it was filled with the personal satisfactions she had hoped for.

In December 1966 Grace writes of a visit to her mother in Dallas and then attendance at a convention of the National Council of Teachers of English in Houston. The Astrodome wowed her: “There never was such a place! It looks like the world would look if you could see it all at once.” In a February 1967 letter to a friend she says that she hopes to get a fellowship to complete her masters the next summer. In closing, she dwells on her delight in being a grandmother: “Isn’t it fun to have a grandson? Stephan is a doll. Wish you could see how long and how bright he is!”

In May, Graces writes of a professional conundrum. She has told her principal that she can’t live on her current salary but found the response less than encouraging. Meanwhile, a new community college is being established in Wilkesboro and they have interviewed her for a position there “in the area of humanities, which I want to move into, providing it is literature-based.” The salary is nearly twice what she is making. While she is considering this, St. Andrews, the local college where Jim had taught, offers her “a dual position, assistant dean of student life, and a chance to help plan and teach in a new humanities course.” Then, at last, the high school principal weighs in with a raise.

“Now — what do I do? I have tried to just live each day and yet all of these things have suddenly come my way. I am still strongly Presbyterian-oriented enough to ask: Why, and what does this mean in my life?”

Grace took the St. Andrews job. She hated to leave the classroom teaching she’d so loved, but the salary remained inadequate. To mark her departure, Grace’s students pooled their resources and bought her a Steuben Glass whale. Her junior class had chosen to read the unabridged version of Moby Dick. Some were waylaid by Melville at first, “but soon everyone was as excited about the book as I am. And now I have a beautiful, perfect crystal whale to remind me of our exhilarating learning experience and of my generous, affectionate 78 Special English students.”

In September 1967, she writes that “the new work is so different that I am not able to tell you whether I like or am just doing it. Perhaps the best sign will come tomorrow when I get my first salary check and see that I am finally making enough to live on.” She is spending the great bulk of her time not on teaching but on “deaning,” which she enjoys far less. On the other hand, she has gotten to see her grandson twice in two months. “He is strong and active and altogether delightful to be around. I can feel him and want to hug him right now.”

Grace with her grandson

In the fall of 1967, she buys a house. She writes a friend: “At first I was horrified at the prospect, but finally after talking with two wise and able business men and friends, I realized that buying a certain type of house was an investment as well as actually cheaper than paying the exorbitant rent I was paying.’ (Jim and Grace, having spent most of their married lives in church-provided homes, had never owned a house.)

She has a rich and compelling network of friends and colleagues in Chapel Hill — including Reynolds Price and longtime journalism professor Walter Spearman — and she writes to a friend that she has been invited to “two cocktail parties with the journalism, radio, theater, motion-picture, television crowd.” In August of 1968, Grace is awarded her master of arts in teaching degree from the University of North Carolina. She feels proud of her very high grades, and welcomes my calling her, in a letter from my summer job at Glacier National Park, “my scholar-mother.”

Over the next several years, the letters grow sparse. Surely she is talking with all of us by phone more now than before. Also, she is devotedly pursuing her longtime interest in African-American studies. She creates and teaches a new course at St. Andrews: English 203, Black American Literature. The 25-item booklist is a treasure, and I have folders full of her lecture notes on Langston Hughes, LeRoi Jones, James Baldwin, Jean Toomer, Alex Haley, Eldridge Cleaver, W.E.B. DuBois, June Jordan, Ralph Ellison and more. But it was the work of Richard Wright that particularly compelled her. It was a thrilling moment when Grace was invited to a University of Iowa Afro-American Institute summer seminar in July 1971: “Richard Wright: His work, his world and his influence.” Ralph Ellison gave the introductory lecture.

Earlier in 1971, while I was in graduate school at Northwestern, Grace had come up to research Wright’s years in Chicago. Subsequently, she went with my sister-in-law to gather information on the years Wright spent in Memphis. This research culminated in a journal article that is cited online as still “the best piece of first-hand research” on Wright’s years in Memphis. “Richard Wright’s Memphis” was published in the 1972 Wright issue of “New Letters.”

Reading the article’s ending, it is easy to see why Grace felt so drawn to Wright: “However limiting and hostile {his roots in Delta soil} had been, because he felt deeply enough and was conscious of his own possibilities, he was ‘full of a hazy notion that life could be lived with dignity, that the personalities of others could not be violated, that men should be able to confront other men without fear or shame, and that if men were lucky in their living on earth they might win some redeeming meaning for their having struggled and suffered here beneath the stars.’”

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Grace Notes 16: The End of the Marriage

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A note from Jim to Grace

In the spring of 1966, Jim drove to Tennessee to visit his mother. He left this note for Grace: “When the deadline on my contract was up, I found that I could not sign it. I turned it in yesterday unsigned with a note of resignation. It seemed the only thing to do.” Weeks later, he found a job at Jacksonville University. He’d need to be in Florida by August 15.

In early June, back in Chapel Hill to work on her masters, Grace typed a four-page document to herself: “Why I Want a Divorce — An Effort to Get My Thoughts in a Focus Beyond Emotionalism.”

Life with Jim, she writes, “for both him and me, has become intolerable. We do more to hurt each other, to keep each other from functioning as normal human and productive beings, than we are able to do to encourage and help each other.” She enumerates the causes: “Our different attitudes about almost every subject,” her view that Jim “is always looking for something he’ll never find, and that he thinks I am not the kind of wife he needs and wants, and that if I would only change, things would straighten out.

“In view of this constant friction and tension, there is no peace, no happiness, no companionship — just day by day wondering what will cause unhappiness, tension, misery — and trying to avoid it if at all possible.”

She writes of her teaching job “which came to me out of the blue and yet which I think my whole life was preparing me for.” This “is a life saver, something that gives me personal satisfaction, a feeling that I am worth something as a person and that I am able to give something of my self, my talents, abilities, training.” The job has enabled her to be “less tensely involved in my personal unhappiness.”

Also: “The fact that Geneva is now leaving home to go to college frees me from the responsibility which has held me in the family situation in spite of personal torment and humiliation.

“I am aware that my children may turn against me, that I shall be considered a failure, that I am putting myself out with nothing for my old age, and that my loneliness will be a constant emotion I shall have to face. But the choice is not too difficult to make when viewed opposite that situation which now exists in our marriage — a hopeless, irremediable one, I am convinced.

“Our married life is founded on illusion and I think it is only his pride that makes him want to go on, and that it wouldn’t last any longer than the first few months of the situation which he got in Florida.”

The cover of Grace’s 4-page document, written to herself

The next day, she goes to see a lawyer.

At the end of July, she writes to Jim, saying she wants a separation. He reacts strongly to her “severe” letter. He writes that he wants the marriage to continue. They must both try harder. She should come with him to Florida.

In early August, they meet at a lawyer’s office. At the beginning of the session, Jim repeats his protest. Very shortly thereafter, he “became very businesslike. He had prepared eight questions, very good ones.” By the end of the session, Jim and Grace had agreed on the terms of a separation and had begun talking about what he should take with him from the house they had been renting in Laurinburg.

Grace later wrote to a friend: “The decision had been a long time in coming and was a very difficult one to make and to accept. Now that the break has actually come, there is a definite sense of severance. When Jim signed the papers in the lawyer’s office I felt it, and as I walked out by myself, I realized the utter desolation and loneliness that can come following such a drastic step. Yet I prefer this to the ugliness and hopelessness of the other.”

Finally, she writes, “I really think all the children will find both Jim and me more enjoyable when we are not in that farcical situation. And perhaps Jim will become the able fine teacher everyone thinks he is except himself.”

Grace now undertakes, in visits and phone calls and letters, to explain her actions to her children. To my sister, she writes that, after the session culminating in the separation, “Needless to say I felt bereft, full of a real sense of loss, felt a rush of the loneliness I’ll feel over and over, but also I recognized that I could stand those better than I could stand more despair and the constant unrelieved misery of trying to be something I am not and trying to live in a situation where neither of us was doing the other any good at all.”

Grace told me the news in person, during a weekend visit to Chapel Hill. She told N. of my reaction: “She quite calmly said, ‘I am not surprised, I almost knew it was coming, but of course I am sorry you feel that you have to.’ I am sure she was hurt more than she showed, but she was sincere and accepting without committing herself in any way.”

At the end of my summer job, I drove with Dad in the family’s ancient, oil-burning Chevy to Jacksonville. At the big-box store across from his apartment, I bought him basic cooking utensils. Back in Laurinburg, I packed up my belongings. Grace and I drove to Boston. She dropped me off at college — and headed back to the freer life she had envisioned in that document in June.

Jim applied for a divorce in Florida, where the residency requirement was shorter. It became final in May of 1967. Their complicated 30-year marriage was over.

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Grace Notes 15:The Calm Before…

My siblings, their spouses, Grace, Jim and his mother, and me

We remaining three Overholsers moved to Laurinburg, North Carolina, in the late summer of 1964. Dad had taken a job teaching philosophy at St. Andrews Presbyterian College. I was a junior in high school. Grace was able to go back to her previous work, instructing Sunday School teachers in the region.

Grace writes from Laurinburg that all the family gathered for Christmas 1964. She especially loved the caroling: “I enjoy this part of our family life more than almost any other. It is so GOOD to hear someone playing the piano and different voices singing.” While North Dakota’s Christmas dinner had been pheasant and wild duck, North Carolina’s was rock lobster tails and shrimp-stuffed crab. Friends and colleagues came over to meet their family, and Grace speaks of her pride and delight afterward upon hearing compliments about their children.

In March 1965, Grace reports that she has taken a job at Laurinburg High School, teaching advanced English to 80 students, grades 9–12. (I’m one of them.) The teacher who had planned this new program was experiencing a difficult pregnancy, and Grace was brought in as her replacement. She describes the teaching as “absorbing, challenging, exciting — and something that never stops! So far I have done nothing much except work constantly, only stopping to sleep. For days our breakfast dishes go unwashed. We eat out at night. Geneva cleans the house and does all her ironing.”

In a letter to her wealthy benefactor-friends in Grosse Point, Michigan, she writes: “ Our lives here are busy and full of education, mainly. Jim is making a good teacher, just as he did in Jamestown — though he hates the every-morning 8 o’clock classes and committee meetings and paper grading. I don’t believe he will ever unpack and live life where he is at the moment, but he certainly does contribute a lot to others in spite of his own inability to accept his life and himself and what he has.”

In April 1965 Grace goes to Washington to “assemble with other U of Texas journalism graduates to tour the White House and be with our fellow-student Lady Bird.” The first lady was at the ranch and LBJ was off viewing terrible flood conditions. But “that loss didn’t dampen my enthusiasm” because what she wanted most was to see her former journalism professor “and renew acquaintance with newspaper people who are doing interesting things and whom I knew at school.” Liz Carpenter, then Lady Bird’s press secretary, hosted. “We went through the White House in a way I’d never dreamed of doing.”

Grace sat on Lincoln’s bed, enjoyed the superb views of Washington and relished the “huge Texas shrimp.’ After dinner, they adjourned to the library to hear their professor, DeWitt Reddick, “talk about the writing most people are doing.” He was kind enough to introduce Grace, “tying in her church curriculum writing with her former responsibility as Church Editor of the Daily Texan.” Then it was on to the National Press Club for a drink. Grace chatted with “an editor of Time, two writers from the National Observer, a top advertising man from New York, a correspondent for the New York Times and DeWitt. Sigh.”

Grace in Washington at cherry-blossom time

Another letter to Teena Wilson in Grosse Pointe: Grace will soon send her a copy of Jim’s newly published book, “A Contemporary Christian Philosophy of Religion.” While the subject is challenging, “he writes easily and clearly and I think you will get a lot of it since you are interested in the very things he deals with. He tried to show that religion must have meaning for our whole lives and that modern Christianity must recognize the values given us by music, art, philosophy, drama, other literary forms, psychology and similar contributions of mankind. We must not remain an isolated church, isolated from where man is, where he lives, where he is in this century.”

Grace writes to A., who is to be married the following summer, to say that he should buy his fiancée a ring (with the money she and Jim are giving him as a graduation gift). “She is thoughtful to agree with you about the WISDOM of saving money, but I can say with passion that she will wear your ring with feelings far deeper than mere wisdom.”

Next, a report that I am in Cuernavaca that summer of 1965, living with a local family and studying Spanish, Mexican art and history, archaeology and guitar. I had traveled by bus with Dad, by way of New Orleans, switching to the Azteca train at Nuevo Laredo. I would be flying from Mexico City to Memphis for A’s wedding in mid-August at Dad’s former church. The preacher who succeeded him had generously invited our family to move back into the manse for the occasion.

Jim’s mother, Grace’s mother and Grace at my brother’s wedding

In the fall of 1965, Grace reports that they are “finally replacing the Black Chariot” — the ’55 Chrysler that had carried our family on trips to Mexico, Florida and the Keys, and throughout the West and New England. They bought a used Plymouth. Mom put “all the last of my writing money into it as down payment, $550.”

Grace is teaching again this school year and “I like it better than anything I have ever done except the writing.” Her seniors had each chosen a country whose literature they were “to read extensively in, including examples of all literary types.” One student wrote that he had dreaded the idea of this intensive study, some of the reading was hard, and he had had to make himself keep on. “But now I have an entirely different understanding of people I had known nothing about and of literature I didn’t know existed. I intend to read in other areas now.”

Spring comes, and N. is expecting Grace’s first grandchild, due in early summer. Grace faces a scheduling dilemma. She is now pursuing a master’s degree at the University of North Carolina and hoping to attend two summer sessions in Chapel Hill. She also wanted to be in New Haven with N. and the new baby, but snow days have extended the teaching year. And, at the end of the summer, she “should belatedly behave as a proper mother” and help Geneva get ready for college. Grace concludes: “I am too busy, but I love learning and I’m enjoying life and I hope you will all forgive me for neglecting each one of you.”

Neglected or not, I set off for my camp-counselor job in the mountains near Asheville — with only a slight premonition of how dramatically our lives would change that summer.

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Grace Notes 14: On the Move Again

Grace, dwarfed by Jamestown’s buffalo statue

After 26 years and six pulpits, Jim left the ministry to teach philosophy. In the fall of 1962, he went (alone) to Jamestown College in North Dakota. My brother moved our mother and me into a little rental house in Memphis before heading off to college.

Grace’s letters that autumn speak mostly of her writing and its deadlines. Then: On Thanksgiving, out of the blue, Jim calls to say that he is coming to Memphis for Christmas. Also, he has applied for a house on campus for the next year; he wants us to join him. In a letter to a friend, Grace writes: “What am I going to do? I honestly do not know.”

After Jim’s holiday visit, she writes to my sister (now at Oxford) that we “had a very happy Christmas on the whole and it was good to have a family again — both Geneva and I felt we were more complete.” At the tail end of the very next note to her, Grace says: “We are planning to move to North Dakota some time next summer.”

What was her thinking? In a zigzagging letter to Grandmother, she puzzles it out: “It is almost impossible to work out a livable arrangement unless both people involved work on it together. At least that is my feeling about it. I am fully aware that many women have adapted themselves to an existence which may be similar to mine, but the fact that I could not do it seems to me an indication that I can’t because I do not believe that is what life is for me. Some things Jim said while in Memphis for Christmas indicate there is still the same thinking in his dealings with me which has prevailed, perhaps always: ‘Now, when you come up there, you have to be like those women up there — they LOVE their husbands, they are not the kind of women that do a lot of other things — they really love their husbands.’”

So why did she decide to go? “I’d rather be married than not married. I miss the completeness of a family. I miss Jim in many, many ways, and I have a genuine, deep affection for him when he is in his more attractive, normal, outgoing relation to me.” It would be interesting to live on a campus. She wants now 15-year-old me “to have a normal family life” for a few more years. Plus, it’s difficult “to have poise and courage” in the situation she is currently in.

She returns to the challenges: She’s read an article in Christianity Today about illnesses afflicting ministers — with symptoms of depletion, discouragement, bitterness — saying they usually involve unresolved inner conflicts. She tells her mother that the fact that she thinks any real solutions lie “in something that has happened to Jim and can’t be corrected without a miracle or treatment he would never agree to leaves me with a sick, chilled feeling.” She is “going back into something with my eyes open knowing it will demand more than I perhaps have the ability or courage to give and yet at the same time, aware that the alternative — of making a new life for myself without him, working, and trying to help Geneva and A. to adjust to this unfortunate situation — is not what I want, either.”

The only right decision is to go, she says, but with no false chin-up attitude that will crumble at first sign of failure. She concludes the letter to her mother: “Let me have your reactions. But please don’t be Pollyannish or too soothing. Life still has much meaning, I have more faith than I have ever had, but I believe my insight into myself and into life’s deepest possibilities enables me to look it straight in the face and not try to varnish things over with a good-spirits tonic.”

Atypically, Grace has kept her mother’s response. Grandmother is “glad you are trying hard to work things out. Just keep on groping, and if writing it down helps — and I feel it does — send it on to me. I think the big trouble with both of you is hurt pride and resentment, and the fact that Jim is so darn sure he is right about everything.” Also: “You know a woman can let a man think he’s boss when he really isn’t. Funny thing, but some people used to say I was the boss. Guess it was because poor Daddy had so much trouble, he had to lean on me. I had to be strong.”

In April 1963, Grace again writes her mother, saying that she has “finished my second set of publications! It is quite an emotional let-down and I am sort of at loose ends and yet glad to be able to do a few other things. Geneva is happy that I am acting like a mother again and able to take up skirts, mend, and iron a few things when she is in a jam.”

My set of Grace’s Sunday School publications

As for the upcoming move, “I really have no idea what the future holds for me in this entirely new church, state, life. I suppose this is a place where I shall have to let my faith in God and his plan for my life take over and hope that I can accept what comes and that something new and different and exciting and challenging will come. I like to think of it as an experience, but at times I feel rather sick to think of how different my life will be from anything I have known.”

We move to Jamestown. A letter from January 1964 notes that “before Christmas, Geneva had been a bit nostalgic about former Christmases when more family and friends were around, and when the tree was piled high with gifts from church members and friends and it took hours to open them.” But this Christmas brought its own pleasures. My brother took the bus up from Nashville. Grace whipped up her Yuletide traditions: a coconut cake, a white and dark fruit cake, chocolate fudge cookies, lemon cookies, fruit peel, panettone. She roasted a pheasant a neighbor had given us and two wild ducks Dad had shot.

The Jamestown letters tell of blizzards, of our fox terrier Sheba sinking deep into snowbanks, of minus 24 temperatures. Their campus social life is “interesting and varied.” Jim’s book, “A Contemporary Christian Philosophy of Religion,” sent to publisher after publisher over the years, is at last accepted for publication. Grace writes of A’s academic successes; she is “staggered with honor that such a person is kin to me.” Illustrations for her book arrive: She says the drawings of Jesus are “too pretty” and wants “to superimpose a forceful, strong rugged Rouault on them.” She is reading James Baldwin and finding him “a perceptive and richly rewarding writer.”

Throughout her North Dakota letters, Grace makes clear her growing affection for what she calls “The Great Northwest.” She writes of the broad and somewhat bleak prairieland, the vastness, the sweep, the bright coldness of this section of our country and the sincerity and friendliness in the hearts of the people.

Before the end of the school year, Jim has taken a new position. The three of us would be moving again — to a small town in North Carolina. I’d already been to two high schools. I asked Dad to promise that we would stay two years so I could graduate from the next one.